Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

When I was reading Howard’s paper on secure application roles again this morning I noticed that he had another paper listed in the menu on the right called Read-only Tables so I went to have a look.

This paper is again in Howard’s now familiar style of a question and answer session. The paper is very well written and explores the issue raised originally here a couple of weeks ago. I also posted about this thread in my web log at the time. You can find that here.

Howard explores this issue in depth and gives some excellent examples of how various methods can be used to prevent DML from occurring on a table such as locking the table, VPD and DML triggers and then shows that all of them are temporary solutions that can be bypassed easily.

Howard then goes on to show the only possible technique which is to put the table in a read only tablespace. He discusses this technique in depth and compares it to other solutions proposing that this is the only real way to do it.

Excellent paper as usual from Howard. Again its here.